Ugh, what a horrible game yesterday.

"When we win games, it's because of our defense, and tonight we were a no-show," Jason Kidd said. "Defensively, we were terrible. Offensively, we weren't that good either."

It's annoying to see the Mavs unable to convince themselves to play well against lesser opponents, but a scarier thought is that maybe they just can't.  I'm not to that point yet, but Dirk sees the obvious trend.

"We've been down 10, 12, 15 [points]; we were even down 30 [actually 29] the other night against Minnesota, so I don't think it has anything to do with Memphis," said Dirk Nowitzki, who had 28 points, but just six in the second half."We always have to fight back. We did that over the last couple of weeks, but at some point all the fighting back is going to haunt you and come back and hurt you."

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Mike Fisher goes over his pregame plan to see where Dallas went wrong (hint: everywhere).

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Sefko says Rick Carlisle's substitutions didn't work yesterday, but do we really think it mattered?

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Caplan has a little on Howard's inconsistent performances.

"We need him to be aggressive defensively and offensively," Jason Kidd
said. "For him, it's rebounding; we need him to play like he did against the Clippers in LA, fill up the stat sheet, and we didn't get that from him [Sunday]."

Maybe we just need Dirk to sit out a game to get him back on track.